[Rhodes22-list] Your Tax Dollars At Work

[brad haslett]

Slim,

You got this one wrong, quite the contrary, BB got it
right.  Here is another perspective.

Brad

----------------

  
September 16, 2005 

Space, food, medicine, protection: it's better here in
Barbara's hall of plenty
Gerard Baker
 
 
 
 
 
BARBARA BUSH. Don’t you just love her? Last week she
put her elegant heel right into what her husband used
to call deep doo-doo when she told a television
interviewer that evacuees from Hurricane Katrina who
had been housed in the Houston Astrodome were really
very happy with their lot. 

“What I’m hearing is that many of them want to stay in
Texas,” the former First Lady said. “The hospitality
has been so overwhelming. And so many of the people in
the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway,
so this is working very well for them.” 

Not since Louis XVI’s missus puzzled about the dietary
choices of indigent Parisians has there been such an
appalling display of aristocratic ignorance. How dare
she? How could she? Even the White House winced. 

But in the disgust that greeted her remarks in
Highgate and the Upper West Side no one stopped to
consider the possibility that Mrs Bush was, in fact,
dead right. 

Anyone who has visited the most deprived parts of
America’s cities, rather than merely empathised with
them from afar, would have no difficulty whatsoever
with the proposition that the inhabitants would prefer
an air-conditioned sports stadium with all the food
they can eat, the country’s best medical attention and
the benign security of National Guard protection to
the hunger, sickness and lawlessness in which many of
them live. 

Large parts of Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago or Los
Angeles already look, on their best days, as though
they have been hit by natural disasters. I’m not at
all surprised to hear that the fortunate who made it
to Houston are eager to start new lives there, rather
than return to the crime-infested housing projects of
New Orleans. 

But Mrs Bush touched on a larger truth, almost wholly
obscured in the rush to judgment. Most of the
attention has focused on how the Government failed in
responding to the disaster. I have done it myself.
Grand conclusions have been drawn about the (flawed)
nature of American society. I’ve done a bit of that
too. But little has been said about what the response
of ordinary Americans — not mayors or governors or
presidents — tells us about the strengths of that same
American society. 

Another lucky group of New Orleans evacuees has been
housed not far from where I live in Washington at the
DC Armoury, the local headquarters of the National
Guard. This week, along with the truckloads of food,
water and clothes, came something that will, in the
longer term, be of even greater assistance, a group of
eager employers looking for workers. 

Forty-two local businesses participated in a job fair
for the new homeless at the Armoury on Tuesday; more
wanted to take part but couldn’t because there was
limited space. Twenty of the 150 or so evacuees were
hired on the spot. An official at the District of
Columbia government involved in organising the event
said that more were expected to be offered jobs in the
next few days. The exercise was such a success that
employers are demanding another one. If there’s anyone
left still to hire it will take place in the next
couple of weeks. 

The story is being replicated across the country. The
victims of Katrina are getting new opportunities. Some
of it comes from an immense outpouring of compassion
by Americans in the form of hundreds of millions of
dollars in charitable contributions and unquantifiable
help in housing families and schooling children. Some
of it comes from the unsentimental compassion of the
free market: the unerring capacity of the capitalist
system to match those who have something with those
who need it, whether it be labour, capital, goods or
services. 

Both tell us far more about the way this country
works, the strengths of its values and people, than
the bureaucratic bungling in Baton Rouge and
Washington. 

Of course you will almost certainly not have read or
seen much about this, especially outside the US. The
world has indicted America once again on charges of
ineptitude and racism and has moved on to more
important matters such as Britney Spears’s baby. For a
variety of reasons this good news about the response
of ordinary Americans is of little interest to the
media. First, no self-respecting reporter wants to
waste his time with insights into the better angels of
human nature. No one ever won a Pulitzer or a Bafta
recounting banal tales of man’s humanity to man. 

Secondly, it really doesn’t fit too well into the
stereotype that entrances most of the world these
days. Anything that doesn’t show Americans as stupid,
selfish, warmongering, religious bigots, half of them
living in pampered luxury in garish purpose-built
Italianate mansions, the other half downtrodden in the
ghetto by Halliburton stock-owning fat-cats, isn’t
going to make it to the front pages or the Ten O’Clock
News. 

But the main reason I think these recovery efforts by
millions of people attract insufficient attention is
that most people have become conditioned to thinking
solely in terms of government’s responsibility. Of
course, the bulk of the recovery effort must be paid
from public funds as President Bush announced
yesterday but most Europeans and — despite decades of
a so-called conservative revolution — a large number
of Americans, can’t think beyond the government. 

Something bad happens: it’s government’s fault for not
preventing it. It’s government’s responsibility for
cleaning up the mess. And if the mess gets bigger,
that’s government’s fault too. 

The irony is that New Orleans is one of those cities
where government-dependency had reached such levels
that a kind of economic and social anomie had set in.
For many of its victims the escape depicted by Barbara
Bush is just what they needed. 


gerard.baker at thetimes.co.uk 
 
 
 

--- Slim <salm at mn.rr.com> wrote:

> I thinks Barbara Bush's remark was the biggest
> Let-them-eat-cake comment
> I've heard for a long time.  But then, let's
> consider the source.  All they
> did when she was 1st lady was try to keep the
> microphones away from her.
> Every time she spoke, there was damage control.
> 
> Slim
> 
> On 9/19/05 7:15 PM, "R22RumRunner at aol.com"
> <R22RumRunner at aol.com> wrote:
> 
> > Saroj,
> > Ah, the old treat em like mushrooms routine. Keep
> em in the dark and feed  em
> > horse manure.
> > 
> > Rummy
> > __________________________________________________
> > Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help?
> www.rhodes22.org/list
> 
> __________________________________________________
> Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help?
> www.rhodes22.org/list
> 



	
		
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